There’s good news and not-so-good news to tell you about Vancouver’s plans for a new Strathcona library. This is an update of an earlier blog that suggested the library would be built at the expense of local heritage.

The triple-barrelled good news is that the the community gets a new library, along with up to 20 units of supportive housing for single mothers and their children, and that the neighbourhood’s historic Heatley Block and two adjacent heritage houses aren’t going to be razed. (Photo credit ianiwurm.) Here’s the story I wrote Tuesday.

The bad news is that the city’s decision to not proceed with building on the Heatley Block cost city taxpayers something in the neighbourhood of $600,000 in added land costs and a loss on the sale of the property.

This is, in essence, the price of preserving heritage in the city. Two years ago Vancouver’s real estate services division bought the Heatley Block for $1.8 million, including two houses built in 1889 and 1898. The older of the two is reportedly one of the 10 oldest houses in the city.

Eric Smith, the director of corporate services for the Vancouver Public Library, told me today that the city sold the Heatley Block for $1.6 million in 2008 after the neighbourhood rose up in arms at the prospect of the buildings being torn down for a new library. Still wanting to build in the area, the library had the real estate department locate two commercial properties in the next block over, at 720 and 730 East Hastings. Smith said the city bought the two properties, including the Cigar Emporium an Union Auto Glass (left), for just under $2.4 million. It was contingent on it selling the Heatley Block. But by that time the market had fallen, and the city took a $200,000 bath on the block.

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Talking about buildings coming down, yesterday Mayor Gregor Robertson made much of an old habit people have of “deconstructing” old buildings and recycling the materials for future use. He was at a house on West 15th that is being torn down to make way for a new low-energy, low-footprint house, and was extolling the virtues of a program to teach young people some basic deconstruction skills.

He’s looking for a way to divert more and more of the materials from the roughly 750 houses that get torn down each year from getting into the landfill. The folks doing this deconstruction, Barry Joneson and Pacific Labour and Demolition, are salvaging what they can and reselling the materials. You can’t get that kind of clear fir lumber anymore and there’s a developing market for reclaimed old-growth timber. My colleague Gerry Bellett filed a story on this deconstruction program.

Of course, anyone who cruises the West Side neighbourhoods on a spring or summer weekend will find lots of “demo sales” where this kind of reclaimation goes on all the time. My parents did that for years, furnishing their cabin floors with salvaged oak flooring.

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Robertson is defending the city’s decision to go with a post-election date for the Coroner’s Inquest into the Pandora Street fire. He told reporters at the deconstruction announcement that the city was offered two dates by the B.C. Coroner’s Service, one close to the election and one after, and while the city preferred the latter date because staff are busy working on the election, the city didn’t have the ultimate say in which date was chosen.

Robertson dismissed the suggestion that the city was trying to deflect criticism of its handling of the Pandora Street fire (and buidling inspection history) by shunting it off to a post-election inquest.

The fire, which killedDwayne Rasmussen, Garland McKay and Stephen Yellowquill, is also being blamed on the demise of one of the city’s building inspection officials. In January Carlene Robbins left the city after 38 years. The circumstances of her departure were shrouded in mystery but she has now filed a wrongful-dismissal suit against the city.

Re: Heatley Block The spin on this article doesn’t quite tell the whole story. The fact of the matter is that the City did not do due diligence in selecting the Heatly Block asa location for a library. Not only is it a heritage asset but it represents stable low-rent housing and some of the only viable community serving businesses on a bleak block of Hastings. With dozens of shuttered and empty businesses in the nearby vicinity, it becomes abundantly clear that the city was not interested in consulting the community for what we actually want or need but the political capital and optics of building a library in an underserved part of town.

Did the City designate the properties as heritage resources before they were sold? Or is the new owner going to come in to the City and demand a giant density bonus in exchange for not demolishing the Heatley Block and the adjacent houses?

417 Heatley which is part of the Heatley BLock is one of the oldest houses in Vancouver leftover from the Klondike Years. It is worth preserving. Kudos to the preservation society. Wood structures fare better in earthquakes than newer cinderblock buildings Peter F!

This thevancouversunistration waists so much money day in and day out. All the citizens of this town would like would be something like a left turn arrow (like grown up cities have) and mundane things like that. Instead we watch one wasteful and ill conceived project after another. Vancouver is not a world class city and with the mentality in city hall it never will be.

I’m all for preservation of our history; just because we don’t have much of a history doesn’t mean we shouldn’t preserve what we do have for generations to come. However these land deals are pathetic and the city obviously didn’t do it’s research on the market OR the neighborhood. Big mistake.

I am sick and tired of this Heritage preservation BS. Firstly, at only 125 years Vancouver really has nothing in the way of Paris, New York, London or Rome in terms of heritage worth protecting. Secondly, with the potential of an earthquake looming, I would not want to work, live or have my child go to school in any of these heritage death traps. I am afraid that after the big shake, all this preserved heritage stock will be razed to the ground anyway. We may as well beat mother nature to the punch and rid ourselves of the brick dinosaurs.